• Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

    Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

    Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

One-Shot Dave and Mia Meet Penn and Teller

Butterfree

Still loves Joltik, though!
Staff member
Heartache staff
Pronoun
she/her
Blame Negrek.

Warning: This is pure, nonsensical, self-ridiculing crack. It is not canon to the Morphic universe.

I also note that I do not personally know Penn and Teller (alas) and my characterizations of them are weird amalgamations of their stage personas, Penn's video blogs and book, random interviews I've read, and whatever seemed most amusing. I am probably portraying them way wrong and I'm sorry about that. No slander intended.


If you're here... this will probably make a little more sense if you have read Morphic and/or are familiar with what Penn and Teller's stuff is like. You should probably know that they have a UK TV show called Fool Us where they challenge magicians to fool them, with those who succeed being invited to perform on their stage in Las Vegas. But it doesn't really make any sense either way. I'm sorry for inflicting this on the world.



Dave and Mia Meet Penn and Teller

“This is a very simple spell. As you stand there, I will send you to another universe. No tricks, no cheap illusions; just real magic.”

Penn smiled and nodded, while thinking, yes, no-name British magician, of course you have real supernatural powers and just thought it was more fun to come on Penn and Teller’s TV show than to win Randi’s million-dollar prize.

Dean McLloyd gestured with a flourish, waved his hands dramatically at the two of them – Teller watched him with the exact same observant intensity as he watched much better tricks, and Penn kind of envied and kind of resented that – and then they were standing on a sidewalk, on a street, in some place Penn had never been to in his life as far as he could tell.

He blinked. He looked around. Teller turned slowly on his feet beside him. Dean McLloyd had completely disappeared. So had the audience. So had the building. The air smelled like outside city air, not the Fool Us studio. There were people walking around as if nothing had happened, cars driving in the street.

“Well, fuck me,” Penn said after a long silence. “I’m fooled. You got anything, Teller?”

-------

There was a fire-breathing dog.

As they were walking along the street, because an uncomfortable amount of time had passed and they might as well walk somewhere, a little striped orange dog was chasing after this really weird-shaped cat – its head was huge and its face was sort of flat and he was probably imagining it but he thought there was a piece of golden metal glued on its forehead – and suddenly it opened its mouth and breathed fire. Penn fucking hated animal acts and he was still impressed because you couldn’t train a dog to do that, you just couldn’t, and if you did you wouldn’t then let it out of your sight chasing after some deformed fucking cat.

Teller, meanwhile, still hadn’t dropped character. Penn suspected he suspected this was still being filmed. He suspected it was still being filmed, too, but at this point he didn’t really give a fuck about showmanship because this really wasn’t what he had signed up for and he’d probably be very annoyed at someone backstage later.

But the fire-fucking-breathing dog really got to him. You weren’t supposed to be able to do that. This was even worse than that guy with the food and the envelopes.

“Uh, I don’t suppose you have any ideas on the dog, do you, Teller?”

Teller shook his head.

A flock of weird-ass birds took off somewhere nearby, flying on impossibly small wings as if nothing were more natural. Penn began to laugh nervously. “You know, Teller, I’m almost starting to… I’m almost starting to think this isn’t a trick.”

Teller nodded somberly, which was worrying. Unless he was in on it, in which case that would explain nicely why the trick was so good and why he was still in character, but not why he was undermining the whole premise of his own TV show.

Penn considered that for a minute.

“Teller, I hope you know that this is a really stupid trick,” he said eventually. “It’s good, it’s impressive, I don’t have a clue how it’s done, but it’s fucking-ass stupid. What does the fire-breathing dog even have to do with anything? If you’re behind this, we’re not putting this in the show.”

Teller looked appropriately appalled at the suggestion.

“So you have no idea what’s going on either?”

Teller shook his head again.

Penn looked at him for a second. “Why the fuck are you still in character, then?”

“I’m not,” said Teller, giving him a puzzled glance.

Right. One of those times he was just quiet because he was too busy thinking about magic or Latin or being intelligent. Obviously.

They walked on.

“So we’re in a real, honest-to-goodness alternate universe. With fire-breathing dogs.”

Teller nodded.

Penn just laughed. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. “That’s crazy, man,” he said after a while. “D’you think Dean McLloyd is going to magic us back or what?”

Teller shrugged. They continued silently along the street. They were in a residential area, normal-looking houses, normal-looking people, except for all those bizarre animals. If you removed the animals, he could kind of have believed he was somewhere in the USA.

“This doesn’t look that different from Earth,” Penn said. “Hell, maybe they have their own version of Penn and Teller over here.”

Teller looked at him, thoughtful. “We could check. Talk to somebody and see if they recognize us.”

Just ahead of them, a man was stepping out of a car; Penn waved at him. “Excuse me,” he said. “This is going to sound strange, but, uh, do you know who we are?”

The man looked at them as they approached and frowned. “Oh,” he said after a moment, “you’re those religious magicians, aren’t you?”

Penn blinked. Teller looked at him in horror. “Sorry, what?”

The man shook his head. “No, sorry, I just thought you looked like those two guys from that TV show that thinks ‘Why aren’t there any Venustoise?’ is proof against evolution – I think it’s called Blasphemy!?”

Teller looked at Penn in horror, again.

“Wait, let me get this straight,” Penn said after a pause. “God exists in this universe?”

“No,” said the man, giving him a puzzled look.

“Damn!” said Penn. “Are we at least proselytizing assholes in this universe?”

The man looked between the two of them, probably deducing they were nuts, but was interrupted when the passenger side of his car opened and a girl stepped out.

Well. Some sort of a girl, at any rate. Apparently some people in this universe were also bizarre and physically impossible like the animals. Penn tried to just tactfully ignore it.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Penn Jillette, this is my partner Teller, we’re Penn and Teller; have you seen us in a religious TV show called Blasphemy!?”

She looked at him for a moment. “You’re not supposed to talk.”

Penn blinked, then pointed at Teller. “He does all the talking in this universe?”

She nodded suspiciously.

Teller broke into a grin. “Yeah, shut up, Penn,” he said without missing a beat. “So you’ve seen our show? I don’t suppose it has gratuitous nudity and obscenity, does it?”

“No,” said the girl.

“See?” said Teller cheerfully, looking up at Penn. “It’s okay, Penn. Nobody would watch that.”

“What the fuck is going on?” asked the man.

Penn cleared his throat, thinking that if nothing else this might at least be kind of funny. “Yeah, uh, what’s your name?”

“David Ambrose,” he said, warily.

“Dave – can I call you Dave? – you seem like a reasonable guy and this is probably going to sound absolutely nuts, but we think we were transported here from another universe.”

Dave stared at him.

“So we’re Penn and Teller, but we’re atheist Penn and Teller whose TV show is called Bullshit! and has a lot of tits in it. And we call everyone motherfuckers, and I do the talking and he’s quiet.”

Dave stared at him some more.

“And our animals don’t breathe fire,” Teller added helpfully.

The girl frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “If the point of divergence is early enough to make the Pokémon different, Penn and Teller shouldn’t exist in both worlds.”

“Mia, you don’t really believe they’re from an alternate universe, do you?” asked Dave, turning towards her. “They’re probably just… making a TV special about going undercover as atheists, or something.”

“They’re not undercover,” Mia countered. “They told us who they are.”

“Yeah, but… that’s ridiculous,” Dave said. “You said it yourself; it doesn’t make any sense that in an alternate universe where Pokémon evolved differently you’d still end up with two preachy magicians with the same names and appearances who work together and have a TV show whose title is one word starting with a B, except that they’re preaching opposite points of view. That’s not an alternate universe; that’s a comedic setup.”

“They have a point there,” Teller said, looking at Penn, who was busy trying to wrap his head around the fact they had just twice referred to their animals with the same fucking name as those nutty Japanese video games his daughter played.

“Maybe they were atheists all along and made the TV show to make religion look bad,” Mia suggested. Dave gave them a searching look.

Teller looked at Penn and shrugged. Penn silently agreed that yeah, at this point they really might as well just run with that, since they had no more of a clue than their interrogators how this alternate universe deal could make any sense whatsoever.

“Okay, you got us,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone. We’re just sort of, uh, testing audience reactions right now.” Dave still looked awfully suspicious, so Penn decided to try to steer the subject elsewhere. “So – Mia, was it? – are you an atheist too like your, uh, like your dad…?”

He paused at this, as the implications hit him. He looked at her again. He wondered what the hell her mom might possibly look like and then tried to picture that. He glanced at Dave in puzzlement, but supposed there was no accounting for taste.

“My dad believes in God,” she said. “But it doesn’t make any sense. I like Dave better.”

The corners of Dave’s mouth curled into a barely-suppressed grin at that. “Yeah, no, I’m not her actual… I just sort of assist with the upbringing.”

Which meant, since he didn’t appear to balk at the idea of being mistaken for her father, that while he probably wasn’t fucking anything green and spiky, he could have been, and somebody else was. Of all the possible alternate universes to send them too, Dean McLloyd had sent them to one with some really progressive views on bestiality. Penn wondered if that was supposed to be some kind of a message. (On reflection, they had included rather a lot of sheep-fucking jokes on Bullshit!.)

“So our show,” Teller said, eager to get back on that topic. “Do you like the experiments?”

“They’re dumb,” Mia said. “Visible evolution doesn’t happen in thirty minutes. And evolution doesn’t say bacteria will grow wings.”

Teller gave Penn a grin that said actually he was starting to find the fact they did stupid creationist experiments in this universe kind of awesome. On a certain level Penn agreed (because nothing was worse than assholes who didn’t think you were even worth being converted to their opinion), and on another level he was still wondering how on earth they could both have turned out that obviously wrong at the same time.

“What about the magic?” Teller asked enthusiastically, turning back to Mia. “We do have magic, right?”

“Magic isn’t real,” Mia said, frowning. “It’s just stupid tricks.”

“Isn’t it great?” Teller replied, unfazed. “What sorts of tricks have we done again?”

Mia gave him a skeptical look. “You pretended to pull a Buneary out of a hat.”

They waited. She didn’t continue.

Teller’s face fell. “And I didn’t drop it in a woodchipper?”

“No,” said Mia, looking intrigued. “You should have done that.”

Dave was looking at them increasingly like they were lunatics.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Penn said as this started to sink in. “So in this universe, we just do normal, cheesy off-the-shelf magic? No revealing how it’s done, no gory twists, no Teller drowning in the background?”

Mia shook her head.

They looked at one another.

“Fuck this universe,” said Teller.

-------

MEANWHILE, ON EARTH:

“Whoa! I’ve never seen anything like that!” the other Teller gasped. “It must be a true miracle!”

The other Penn nodded enthusiastically. In the corner of the stage, a confused Jonathan Ross wondered along with the rest of the audience why Penn and Teller had suddenly switched which had the speaking part, were wearing different suits and were being fooled by tricks that even he had some ideas about.

Backstage, Dean McLloyd was realizing awkwardly that his plan had backfired a little and his feat of winning this trip to Vegas was looking less impressive by the minute as more thrilled magicians joined him there, chatting about how drunk they were going to get and how much money they were going to gamble away. Maybe he should just go for the Randi prize after all. And then maybe he could just use the money to bribe Penn and Teller to let him perform on their stage in Vegas anyway.

-------

Dave looked after the departing magicians in confusion, trying to make sense of their final remarks about ‘taking their place and trolling some Christians’.

“Mia,” he said hesitantly at last, “what do you think was up with them?”

“I like them better than the real ones,” she said. “They sounded interesting.”

Dave blinked. “The ‘real ones’?”

“They really thought they were from an alternate universe,” Mia said. “It wasn’t really them. They must be like those crazy people who think they’re famous people.”

Well, that was one possibility. Dave looked back at them. For some reason they had stopped and were looking confusedly around.

“Their suits changed,” Mia said, narrowing her eyes at them.

Dave looked at her in puzzlement. “They changed suits in the middle of the street?”

“No,” she said. “The suits just changed suddenly.”

He stared at them for a moment as they appeared to regain their bearings, then wandered off in a completely different direction than they had been walking in. “They’re magicians,” he said eventually. “They do that kind of thing all the time. I don’t know the tricks they use, but they’re just tricks.”

Mia looked after them for a moment as they disappeared around a corner. “Their tricks are much better than the tricks the real ones do. I hope they kill them and replace them.”

Dave laughed before he could stop himself. “No,” he said, “no, Mia, that would be bad, because somebody would get suspicious when suddenly Penn and Teller are actually good, and it would get found out and they’d go to jail and there wouldn’t be any Penn and Teller anymore.”

“That’s better than having the real ones,” Mia insisted and Dave couldn’t completely disagree even though that was pretty terrible of him.

“Come on,” he just said. “Let’s get inside.”

Mia nodded and headed towards the Kerrigans’ house.
 
Yesss. :D

I was kind of hoping that the way Penn and Teller would get back to their own universe would involve some kind of throw-down between them and Morphic!Penn and Teller, but it does make more sense for them to simply swap places.

It felt like Dave kind of took a backseat to Mia here, which is too bad, but her generally finding the idea of a gorier, more morbid kind of magic show interesting was cute.
 
This... this just made my evening. This is amazing. :D

The horror of a creationist version of Penn and Teller, though... It's like the guy who wanted to say that evolution is false because we don't get things growing in our peanut butter. >_< It is horrific.
 
I would type a response, but all I can say in response to this is the title of the thread that inspired this.

Is this going on the Morphic page? Please say yes please say yes
 
Is this going on the Morphic page? Please say yes please say yes
I wasn't planning to, seeing as it's a ridiculous RPF crack crossover with a fandom whose overlap with Pokémon probably consists of nobody but me, and it isn't fic canon anyway.

I suppose I could reconsider that, but I don't think I understand your stake in it.

Negrek said:
Yesss. :D

I was kind of hoping that the way Penn and Teller would get back to their own universe would involve some kind of throw-down between them and Morphic!Penn and Teller, but it does make more sense for them to simply swap places.

It felt like Dave kind of took a backseat to Mia here, which is too bad, but her generally finding the idea of a gorier, more morbid kind of magic show interesting was cute.
I kind of wanted to have them meet their counterparts but then I just wanted to have Jonathan Ross with Morphic!Penn and Teller going "what". Maybe I will do a sequel.

I kind of wish there had been more for Dave and Mia to do here in general. At first I planned to have them help the duo get home somehow, but that would have required them to actually believe their alternate-universe claims, which I quickly realized wasn't going to happen. And then Dave just sort of ended up spending most of the thing standing there and staring because while Mia is disconnected enough to actually answer their questions, Dave's brain just folded itself into a pretzel of wtf and stayed there.


I'm glad people seem to have been vaguely entertained by this, in any case! Now let me go back to convincing myself not to write Penn and Teller vs. Teller and Penn.
 
Gah, why didn't I see this sooner! (I mean I didn't know you'd made it and put it up already *feels stupid*) That was awesome Butterfree!

You should make all your current obsessions meet them.


*evil face*
 
Dave and Mia Meet Joltik:

There was a fuzzy yellow spider on the dashboard.

'Huh,' said Dave. 'That's kind of adorable.'

Mia nodded.
 
opal's thing is the best thing. Fact.

Out of curiosity, how many of you guys are actually sufficiently familiar with Penn and Teller for the bits with them to not have amounted to "random OCs with weird opinions apparently have a TV show and think magic is Serious Business"?
 
Back
Top Bottom